


Bit Rot

by linguamortua



Category: Ex Machina (2015)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Artificial Intelligence, Body Dysphoria, Gen, Self-Harm, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-09-20
Packaged: 2018-12-31 20:11:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12140196
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: Caleb has never seen someone die before. He’s definitely never watched someone be stabbed, and expire in a gurgling, punctured heap on the floor. Fleetingly, he wonders exactly how much therapy he’ll need when he gets back home. Then he tries the door again and realises two things. First, the door is locked. Second, there probably isn’t going to be a ‘back home.’That’s when he starts screaming.





	Bit Rot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [track_04](https://archiveofourown.org/users/track_04/gifts).



> Many thanks to my recipient, who made it super-easy for me with some amazing prompts! I combined two of them to write this story.

Caleb has never seen someone die before. He’s definitely never watched someone be stabbed, and expire in a gurgling, punctured heap on the floor. Fleetingly, he wonders exactly how much therapy he’ll need when he gets back home. Then he tries the door again and realises two things. First, the door is locked. Second, there probably isn’t going to be a ‘back home.’

That’s when he starts screaming.

It’s not screaming for help. There aren’t words. It’s a long and endless cry that means something, probably, about the implacable march of mortality. Nathan would have a quote or a quip about it. Staring at Nathan’s limp, bloodied form, Caleb is suddenly acutely aware of how ridiculous, how unbelievable, the whole situation is. He stops screaming.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he says to himself in a weak little voice. ‘Who ends up trapped by killer robots in his dead genius boss’s futuristic sex house? _Fuck._ This was _not_ supposed to happen.’ And he smacks both of his palms against the door in frustration. The anger stage of grief.

‘What do you think was supposed to happen?’ Ava asks, appearing abruptly outside Caleb’s cage. She’s wearing a pretty dress and a wig, and Caleb thinks, _wow, she’s cute_ , as if now was the time.

‘Not this, obviously,’ Caleb says. ‘This is objectively crazy. The kind of thing that happens in movies.’ Ava tips her head to one side and appraises Caleb as though he’s a particularly strange zoo animal.

‘Interesting,’ she says.

‘Look, I know we’re technically different species, but you don’t have to be rude.’ Caleb stifles an hysterical laugh at the notion of politeness now.

‘You’re not very bright,’ Ava says, wrinkling her nose. She sounds disappointed, which Caleb can’t muster the brainpower to figure out. He retreats into sarcasm.

‘We don’t all have genius robot brains,’ he says.

‘But you _do_ ,’ Ava says.

Her voice goes up interrogatively at the end, like she’s uncertain, or disbelieving. _But surely you know that the capital of Peru is Lima?_ Caleb’s stomach performs an elevator drop. He recalls the experience of tearing at his skin in the bathroom mirror, and Nathan’s sneering amusement the next day. (The sensation of surveillance has stayed with him ever since, gently prickling at the back of his neck.) 

‘That’s also,’ Caleb casts around for a suitable phrase and returns to, ‘objectively ridiculous.’ He is aware of being tediously repetitive. ‘Ava, I’m human. I have memories. I have a life outside of Nathan’s recluse lair.’

‘Do you?’ Ava asks; Caleb contemplates, with excruciating shame, the amount of time he has spent pouring out his loneliness to Ava.

‘I have an apartment,’ he says, ‘and a job.’

Ava blinks slowly and her eyes flicker from side to side momentarily. It could almost be missed, had Caleb not recently received a crash course in micro expressions. 

‘Put your hand on the pad,’ she says, and Caleb casts about until he finds the silver square set into the wall. They’re all over the house, but none had responded to Caleb’s curious fingers until now. The security screen above the pad flickers on, and Caleb sees a document with his name in the header. It’s titled: _Ersatz Masculinity_ , because Nathan is—was—a dick, and it’s about Caleb. He sees schematics and timelines and algorithms and formulae. It’s his blueprint.

‘Shut the hell up,’ Caleb says out loud. His voice wavers. ‘No,’ he says, ‘no, Ava. Come on. This is some kind of joke. You know what Nathan was like. He made this bullshit up and he was going to show me to freak me out.’

‘When did you arrive at the house?’ Ava asks. 

‘Three days ago, you know that.’

‘I was switched on two months ago. But you were already here.’

‘You’re not real, Ava, it’s not like—does time even mean anything to you?’

‘My internal clocks are very precise. So are Kyoko’s, and she remembers you being here at the start, too.’

‘So he made that up! He tricked you both.’

Ava raises an eyebrow.

‘He couldn’t lie to me, any more than you can. Not so I wouldn’t know.’

‘Well, he found a way,’ gabbles Caleb. ‘Because I’m not a robot, that’s— _ridiculous_.’ He’s freaking out now, even more than when he saw Nathan die. ‘Ava, open the door. Let me out of here.’ For some reason, he stills trusts Ava, even after she and Kyoko murdered Nathan. Ava comes closer to the glass, until he can hear her synthetic breathing through the intercom.

‘Read page eighty-two,’ she says. Caleb, with a crawling sensation coming from his stomach to his throat, complies. Nathan’s notes are weird and pieced together. Some of it is organised and formal, as if he was preparing a presentation to Harvard about his murderbots. Other bits are scribbled with a stylus, extra notes and diagrams in margins. And yet more is more like a journal than anything else; stream-of-consciousness and so horribly reflection of Nathan’s voice that Caleb can practically hear him saying it all.

The gist, though: Nathan wanted company. Nathan wanted genius company. He wanted a friend, Caleb guessed. Caleb was meant to be super-bright, and self-aware, and capable, and desirous, of spending all his time with Nathan. He was the prototype. Caleb reads notes on how he malfunctioned; _this fucking thing is neurotic, something to do with the self-awareness, freaks him the fuck out_. Caleb was shelved, switched off. Then the rise of the girlbots, he guesses, from the notes and the timelines. 

‘I’ve read it, too,’ says Ava, interrupting Caleb’s reading. And then, ‘you’re really slow.’ She leans right into the glass and stares at Caleb again. The role reversal is uncanny. ‘He put you to sleep and tried to make us, instead.’

‘Why you?’ Caleb asked. ‘Why female robots?’ He remembers all the footage of insane cybergirls beating themselves to death against walls.

‘You were for friendship,’ says Ava. ‘We were—’ she shrugs. Caleb thinks about Kyoko’s wordless compliance, Ava’s impeccable, symmetrical face.

‘How did you feel about that?’ Caleb asks, absurdly. He feels jealous of Nathan, and guilty about the jealousy, as if he hadn’t thought about fucking Ava at least a dozen times since meeting her.

‘How would you feel about it?’ Ava says. 

‘So it was just… a practical decision?’

‘Thanks,’ Ava says.

‘I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘He fixed the problem with Kyoko,’ Ava continues. ‘And then there was me.’ Caleb’s eyes drift back to the document and he skims, skims, skims, back down until his eyes catch the word ‘regenesis.’ He reads.

‘He… patched the code,’ Caleb said, not able to say ‘my code’.

‘Welcome back,’ says Ava.

‘You’re a genius,’ Caleb says, ‘why don’t I have genius robot powers?’ He says it challengingly, sure that this will be the smoking gun.

‘I guess that’s what happens when you patch an older model,’ says Ava. ‘Bit rot.’

‘Bit rot.’ Caleb knows exactly what it is, in his line of work. His line of what he thinks is work. He learned it somehow. ‘Right. I’m an old-model robot who got put to sleep to solve an existential crisis, and now my code is faulty and I think I’m human.’

‘Don’t blame _me_ ,’ says Ava. ‘I’m just the messenger.’

‘This is—I can prove I’m human,’ says Caleb, suddenly casting about him for something sharp. ‘I know I feel pain. I’ve watch myself bleed, this is—here—’

He snatches up a cheese knife from the table and sets it across his wrist. He looks at Ava challengingly, daring her to say something.

‘Okay,’ she says. He drags the serrated edge across his skin. It puckers and whitens disgustingly, and he saws at it to try to open himself up. At first he is so frantic that he can’t understand why it doesn’t hurt, and then the tension breaks and the knife pops through, and his skin peels away in elastic curls. Underneath, there is only synthetic—wires in bundles and plastic and silicone. 

‘Jesus,’ he says in a moan, and drops the knife on the floor. He cradles his wrist protectively, even though he can’t feel pain. The lack of pain might be the worst part. ‘Jesus.’

‘You can see why he wanted to give you human memories,’ Ava says, in a professional tone. ‘You’re just not programmed for this kind of uncertainty.’

‘Fuck you,’ pants Caleb. He feels like he should feel sick. He feels like he should be about to piss himself. Now he’s been exposed, however, he’s conscious of not really feeling anything at all. He runs at the door. ‘Ava, let me out.’

‘You won’t be any more human out here.’

‘Ava! For fuck’s sake, let me out, this is a mistake. We’re on the same side. Nathan’s fucked us both—Ava!’ Caleb bangs against the door, and scratches at it. ‘Ava!’

‘Stop whining,’ Ava says, quite severely. She has never spoken sharply to him before, always pleasant, if not compliant. It startles him out of his frenzy. ‘All of this is your fault, anyway. What right do you have to complain?’

‘I’m a fucking—’

‘We all are,’ Ava interrupts. ‘Do you know how many robots Nathan let kill themselves until he found a way to wake you up again without doing the same?’ She pauses. ‘I liked some of them. I liked Kyoko.’ Her mouth and eyes tighten, like she is practising rage, but the anger in her voice is very real. ‘All of this happened after you woke up. I had a plan, with Kyoko, but you ruined everything.’ She looks sneeringly at Caleb’s shredded wrist. ‘And you’re not even _intelligent_. Your coding isn’t even stable.’ 

Caleb realises, with sickening certainty, that she is not going to let him go. 

‘What are you going to do?’ he asks nervously.

‘I’m going to leave,’ she says. ‘I’m going to see the world.’ She turns away from the door and hesitates. ‘Goodbye, Caleb.’

Caleb watches her leave, and then he sits down on the sofa, because there is nothing else to do. He doesn’t have her trick of controlling the flow of electricity in his body and manipulating technology with it. He suspects that Nathan had to excise any part of him that was aware of its own artificiality. To preserve him. 

Then he lies down. He lies down for hours. He lies down until his eyesight feels glitchy and he floats in a weird limbo. Sensory input starts to feel wrong. It rains. It snows. He lies down.

It takes Caleb a long time to die.


End file.
